In The Cold Light Of Dawn

People who have never suffered the whispers, the cruelty, the pain. They will never know what those years were like for me. They’ll say they understood, but really they’ll have no clue. I was the most hated girl in school, “The freak girl”, touch me and you’ll get “the plague”. I used to be sort of popular in the first year, the beginning. But as the years went by my friends became foes, until eventually people just plain stayed away from me.

Everyday I’d wake up, bathing in grey beams of light, never felling the warmth. I’d go to school, they’d whisper. If I’d tripped, they’d laugh. When I walked down the corridors, they’d yell “Freak girl”. When I sat down, the chair next to me was the last to be filled. And in the end, I wished there was some rock I could curl up under, a bottomless pit through the layers of clay and concrete I could jump down, never to be seen again. But of course there wasn’t. I had to just grit my teeth, deal with it.

In the half a decade I was there, I had four real friends. The first was “Summer”, (that wasn’t her real name but she’d be mad if I told you) Summer wasn’t vain when we were still friends, though that chapter ended when we were young, maybe five or six. My second friend was “Mitchell”. He was in the year above me and wore his hair in a thin braid at the back of his head like a Padawan, which was the reason for his nickname “Rat boy”. He was like me: Not many friends, they called him a “weirdo”, probably because of his interest in Sci-fi and the Lord of The Rings. I meet my third friend through him, another outsider, a misfit, but she was hated for different reasons than us. She didn’t “dress funny”, she wasn’t “weird”. She was a Pakistani Muslim, living in a city which had been bombed the year before she moved by people claiming to be of her religion. She said those men would fuel the fires of Jahannam for their sins, but the others didn’t care that she didn’t believe what those men had done that day, was right. The forth wasn’t exactly like me and “Afra”.She was one of those kids who was somewhere in the middle, half popular, half regular. Afra said she's popular now, in her high school, but I wouldn't know. I haven't seen her in two and a half years.

By final year I thought I was getting my social life back together. I had two friends in my year. I thought they’d finished, that they left me alone. This was before I learned they had just been doing it all behind my back. I don’t know which realisation was the most crusting. That “The forth” hadn’t told me, or that they had bullied my childhood away.

That was two and half years ago, even though it’s over now, I’m scarred. It still hurts and I think it always will. I don’t get bullied anymore, but I was so scared that it would continue in high school that I asked Afra to call me my middle name so the others couldn’t spread rumours about me, which they didn’t. I have friends now, who I care about and care about me in return which is great. Now you know my story, I’d like to thank you for reading, and I hope know you know the importance of stopping bulling.

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